Engineering Research Associates

When the war ended, the Navy's cryptanalytic group in Washington faced losing its engineers to private industry. The solution was to create the private industry: Howard Engstrom and William Norris talked the financier John Parker into backing them, and in January 1946 Engineering Research Associates opened in an empty glider factory in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The customer was the Navy, the contracts classified and referred to by number — Task 13 became the machine called Atlas, delivered in 1950.

The firm's real contribution was drum storage. For several years ERA's magnetic drums were the fastest and densest memory money could buy, and they were sold on to other people's computer projects. The commercial version of Atlas was named the ERA 1101, because 1101 is thirteen in binary — a joke that made it past the security review. A young Seymour Cray took his first job here in 1950. That the company both built the Navy's classified machines and answered to private owners raised awkward questions, and in 1952 it was sold to Remington Rand, landing under the same roof as Eckert and Mauchly.